Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick came close to collaborating on a Napoleon
film. Andrew Biswell reports on the aborted project only now seeing
the light of day

It is 40 years since Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange was released in Britain, and 50 years since Anthony Burgess published the original novel of the same name. Although both the book and the film have established themselves among the canon of 20th-century classics, another Burgess/Kubrick project from the early Seventies has remained completely unknown. Newly discovered letters in the Burgess archives have revealed their intended collaboration on a film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, which will finally bear fruit later this year when BBC Radio broadcasts the premiere of Napoleon Rising, Burgess’s dramatic version of the Napoleon story. Napoleon Symphony, the novel that sprang from this project and was published originally in 1974, is being reissued by Serpent’s Tail this month.

Kubrick’s involvement with Napoleon began in 1968, shortly after he completed work on 2001: a Space Odyssey. Having completed his science-fiction epic, the director turned his attention to the possibility of making a historical costume drama, which would feature enormous battles reminiscent of his earlier film, Spartacus (1960). He planned to film armies of up to 40,000 men, wearing printed paper uniforms, from a helicopter. In a production note from 1968, he wrote that newly developed fast photographic lenses would allow him to film interiors using ordinary window light – or even candlelight – which, he said, “will look much more beautiful and realistic than artificial light”.

Kubrick was determined to film Napoleon’s complete career, from his childhood in Corsica to his death on St Helena, with historically accurate costumes and realistic dialogue. His preparations for the film were so detailed that they could accurately be described as Napoleonic. Kubrick hired Felix Markham, an Oxford historian who had written a biography of Bonaparte, to compile a day-by-day chronology of the Corsican conqueror. He wanted to know everything about Napoleon, including details of where (and with whom) he had slept every night of his life, what he ate, and the names of his servants, staff, friends and enemies. Markham and his team of assistants produced thousands of cross-referenced file cards, containing a wealth of biographical information.

Yet the writing of a satisfactory script remained a problem. Kubrick had completed his own draft by July 1969, but he was very doubtful about his decision to represent the passing of time by using a narrator (similar to the role played in 1975 by Michael Hordern in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon). Having written a comprehensive set of production notes and a detailed budget, he reluctantly put his Napoleon script aside and worked solidly on A Clockwork Orange throughout 1970 and 1971.

Burgess entered the Napoleon project in December 1971. Having previously corresponded with Kubrick via his agent, he met the director in London for a private screening of A Clockwork Orange. He was an avid admirer of Kubrick’s films, and claimed to have watched Paths of Glory (1975) at least 10 times. He wrote enthusiastically to Kubrick that A Clockwork Orange was “a great film and I don’t use ‘great’ in the colloquial American sense”. In a review of the film for The Listener magazine, he said that it was “very much a Kubrick movie, technically brilliant, thoughtful, relevant, poetic, mind-opening”.

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At their first meeting, Kubrick mentioned to Burgess that he planned to make a Napoleon film, and Burgess suggested that Beethoven’s third symphony (the Eroica) might provide a suitable structure and soundtrack for the Napoleon story. Beethoven had originally intended to dedicate the symphony to Bonaparte, but he tore up the dedication when he learnt that Napoleon had invaded Switzerland.

This musical suggestion promised to be the narrative breakthrough that Kubrick had been looking for. He declared that he was “very excited” about the possibility of a symphonic structure, and Burgess was sent away to develop the idea in the form of a novel that could then be translated into a script. Over the next few weeks and months, Kubrick sent Burgess a series of letters in which he asked about the progress of the novel and recommended useful historical works.

Burgess was an amateur composer who had already written two symphonies and a variety of piano pieces in addition to his novels and non-fiction books about James Joyce. For many years, he had toyed with the idea of writing a novel in a musical form, and he believed that the Eroica Symphony was, as he put it, “Beethoven’s finest orchestral exercise in sonata form”. Each passage within the score corresponds to an episode in the novel, and Burgess made notes to himself about how the opening chapter would proceed: “England – Egypt – The Army – sad condition – Equip them! – Victory – Josephine in love with Charles?”

Burgess reported his progress to Kubrick in a letter dated May 2, 1972: “The position is that I’ve got Napoleon into the first consul’s chair and am working up to Marengo, and then the coda of the movement brings him to bells and trumpets and Te Deums to announce his coronation. A hundred-odd-pages. The next hundred-odd (slow movement) covers the Russian retreat, meditations on what went wrong etc. Then the scherzo, finally the set of variations on the ‘constructive’ Bonaparte. Filmwise, what you need is the first 200 pages, I think.”

But the decision to follow the structure of Beethoven’s symphony presented new challenges. The second movement of the Eroica is a funeral march, and Burgess decided that it was necessary to kill off Napoleon and show his funeral procession at the beginning of the second chapter, only to resurrect him in chapters three and four.

When Burgess sent the first half of his Napoleon Symphony manuscript to Kubrick in June 1972, he did so with high hopes that it would solve the narrative problems the director had been wrestling with for more than four years. Kubrick’s letter of reply was a masterpiece of polite regret. Although he found much in the novel that was “obviously excellent”, he felt that Burgess had reordered the chronology of events to the detriment of the story, that the dialogue lacked realism, and that Burgess’s comic vision of Napoleon fell short of his heroic stature.

Nevertheless, the Napoleon Symphony novel is one of Burgess’s most important and experimental works. After Kubrick had turned it down, Burgess was free to develop his plot in a highly modernist way, making extensive use of literary parodies in the concluding chapters. For example, Napoleon’s death scene is written as a parody of Henry James, because the dying James famously had a delusion that he was Napoleon. This goes far beyond anything that could find a place in a commercial film.

Undeterred by Kubrick’s rejection, Burgess went on to rework his Napoleon material as a stage play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but the production fell apart when the director who had commissioned it resigned from the company. This script has recently been rediscovered, and adapted for radio by the playwright Anjum Malik.

There is a curious epilogue to the story. When Burgess published Napoleon Symphony in 1974, he dedicated it both to his wife and “To Stanley J Kubrick, maestro di color”. The Italian quotation comes from Dante’s Inferno, where it refers to Aristotle (“the master of those who know”).

At first glance, it sounds like a compliment. But Burgess was also thinking of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which deploys the same quotation in a more ambiguous context: “Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno.” Although Kubrick seems not to have noticed the insult, there is little doubt that Burgess’s dedication was a kind of public vengeance-taking against the wealthy and mostly hairless Kubrick, who had declined to translate his Napoleon story on to the big screen.

* Andrew Biswell is the director of the Anthony Burgess Foundation. ‘Napoleon Symphony’ is published this month by Serpent's Tail. ‘Napoleon Rising’ will be broadcast on BBC Radio later this year